Month: July 2022

On Monday, Americans learned of the latest tragic mass shooting, this time taking place at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, an affluent suburb of Chicago. As of this writing, seven people died and dozens have been injured.

It was an all too familiar sight, and in the aftermath, many in Chicago were willing to delve into the frustration of seeing this happen again and again, with no changes in restrictions on guns, particularly just weeks after the Supreme Court took away the ability of states to enact certain gun legislation. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker issued one of the stronger statements from a politician of his stature in recent memory following a shooting.

“If you are angry today, I’m here to tell you to be angry. I’m furious. I’m furious that yet more innocent lives were taken by gun violence. I’m furious that their loved ones are forever broken by what took place today. I’m furious that children and their families have been traumatized. I’m furious that this is happening in communities all across Illinois and America. I’m furious because it does not have to be this way and yet we as a nation, well, we continue to allow this to happen…There are going to be people who say that today is not the day, that now is not the time, to talk about guns. I’m telling you there is no better day and no better time than right here and right now.”

On the Southside of the city, the White Sox played the Twins not long after the tragedy. After the game, pitcher Liam Hendricks, who is Australian, offered his thoughts on how, in his words, “stupid,” American gun laws are, explaining how Australia enacted gun restrictions following a mass shooting.

As Hendricks notes, the continued response to mass shooting after mass shooting being “do nothing about the guns” is an incredible indictment of the country’s values.

Fox News is in big trouble, this time for its involvement in spreading lies about voter fraud following the 2020 Presidential Election.

Dominion Voting Systems, the tech company that’s sued everyone from former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to ultra-conservative news networks like OAN and Newsmax, has now set its sights on Fox News. Like its fellow networks, Fox News dedicated substantial airtime to promoting ridiculous conspiracy theories about the company’s voting technology, theories that included dead Venezuelan presidents and secret government plots. The problem? There might be evidence to suggest that Fox knew all of those voter fraud claims were false and they still pushed that narrative out to their audience. In fact, there’s enough probable cause that a judge on Delaware’s Superior Court just gave the suit a green light, which means Fox News czar Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan Murdoch, should be worried.

According to a new report, Judge Eric David determined that the Murdochs either “knew outright that Dominion had not manipulated the election or recklessly disregarded the truth.” Currently, Dominion is suing Fox for $1.6 billion. They’re also seeking $1.6 billion in damages from both OAN and Newsmax. And they have a fairly good shot at getting that money according to Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a constitutional law professor at Florida’s Stetson University. Spelliscy told Huffpost that Fox News should’ve never given Trump’s “big lie” the “megaphone” that it did, especially after Dominion asked the network to stop spreading disinformation.

The recent ruling also means that communications between the Trump White House, Fox News personalities, and the Murdochs can now be used as evidence in the case.

“I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives,” Media Matters for America chief executive Angelo Carusone told The Guardian.

(Via Huffpost & The Guardian)

Rudy Giuliani and Lindsey Graham just found themselves sucked into the grand jury investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged election meddling in Georgia. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump was recorded during a now infamous phone call where he threatened and pleaded with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to somehow “find” votes to flip the election results in his favor. A recording of the call was provided to The Washington Post, and a special grand jury has been convened to determine whether to bring charges against Trump.

According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the subpoenas for Giuliani, Graham, and the top members of Trump’s legal team mark a significant move to get the former president’s inner circle to testify. While Giuliani will almost certainly try to exert attorney-client privilege, as will notorious Trump lawyer John Eastman (who was also named), the Fulton County DA’s office is looking to find ways to compel their testimony:

The District Attorney’s office argues that activities that seek to reverse certified election results are not protected by so-called legislative immunity.

“Where dishonesty or misinformation was the result, Members should be subject to questioning by the special purpose grand jury,” the DA wrote in a recent court filing.

McBurney, who heard arguments from the DA’s office and the lawmakers, is currently drafting a framework about the types of questions prosecutors can ask without violating immunity rules.

The Georgia subpoena is yet another hit for Giuliani who has been ensnared in Trump’s “stolen election” efforts. The former “America’s Mayor” was recently named in Cassidy Hutchinson’s explosive testimony to the January 6 hearing. He’s also facing several multi-billion lawsuits from election software companies. But other than that, things are going pretty well.

(Via The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Azealia Banks may not enjoy fans mashing up her music with Beyonce’s new single “Break My Soul,” but it looks like some stars really do appreciate it when fans reinterpret their songs in cheeky ways. One such artist is Adele, who acknowledged a viral fan-made video mashing up her song “Under The Bridge” with Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body” during a recent show in London.

The mashup was inspired by a trend on TikTok of fans performing Megan’s “Body” choreography to the seemingly incongruous “Under The Bridge.” Its creator, who goes by Ben Vertz, crafted the video to edit one of Megan’s “Body” verses into the instrumental for “Under The Bridge” and became kind of a hit on the platform in its own right, even becoming the subject of several viral tweets like the ones below.

It seems that Adele loved the mashup so much that she decided to incorporate the choreo into her own live show, as seen in a few more tweets Ben Vertz posted himself after being sent a few angles by fans on social media.

Megan herself caught wind and shared a clip to her Instagram Story, shouting out “Hot Girl Adele.”

And thus, we are one step closer to a legit Megan Thee Stallion/Adele collaboration, which is a win for everybody — one made possible, once again, by those oddball geniuses on TikTok.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Charli XCX is a pop star but not a conventional one as she has proven time and time again. One thing about pop star culture that Charli doesn’t get is how they’re expected to be relatable to fans, a prospect that doesn’t sound appealing to her at all.

In a new Vogue Australia feature, Charli says, “I’ve always been confused by this desire [for pop stars] to tell everyone what you had for breakfast and that ‘the realer you are, the more authentic you are.’ I don’t really think that’s true — I like my pop stars to be demonic and crazy and inaccessible.”

She also spoke of her own relationship with pop star expectations early in her career, saying, “When I was younger, I’d be in record label meetings and they’d be like, ‘You need to brush your hair and make sure girls like you!’ Again, I found that quite funny. I would never brush my hair and would never smile in photos, and the record label would be like, ‘Who do you think’s gonna buy your album?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, freaks like me, probably.’”

Check out the full feature here.

Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After previewing her upcoming HBO Max series Rap Sh!t with a twerk-tastic teaser, Issa Rae finally shared the official trailer today, revealing more detail about the show’s plot. While previous descriptions had the show sounding like an unofficial City Girls biography (they’re listed as executive producers), the series will actually address the fractious dichotomy facing women who pursue careers in rap.

The narrative follows two estranged high school friends from Miami, Mia and Shawna, as they reunite and form a rap duo. However, there’s friction within their ranks as Shawna (comedian Aida Osman) dreams of making it as a more socially-conscious rapper, lamenting the industry’s expectations of booty-baring and rump-shaking for women in hip-hop (as one observer puts it in the trailer, “Just say you want to be Queen Latifah!”). Meanwhile, the more freewheeling Mia (Love and Hip Hop: Miami star KaMillion) is a single mother willing to do whatever it takes to provide for her four-year-old daughter. Over the course of the show, they will learn to lean on their sisterhood, even when they’re at odds over how to present themselves as Black women in entertainment — or in general.

They’ll also encounter Miami nightlife characters who try to help them reach their goals, such as Chastity a “sex work manager” with connections throughout the industry as a result of her profession, and Jaboukie Young-White’s music producer Francois Boom, whose arrogant social media posts both inspire and discourage Shawna, his former classmate. News flash, kids: That money your favorite rappers flash on camera isn’t always the real deal.

The show seems to tie together threads from the last few years of discourse as new female rappers have emerged on the scene and detailed their struggles with the rap biz’s double standards for them, such as Rapsody and Cardi B being pitted against each other, Latto’s insistence that women have to do twice as much as their male peers for less recognition, and City Girls’ own insistence that they could have made more “relevant” content but that consciousness isn’t commercially viable. I guess you could say the show kind of is their biography — and the biography of any woman trying to make it in hip-hop.

Watch the official trailer for Rap Sh!t above.

Last week, just six months following the Astroworld tragedy at Travis Scott’s Houston festival that left ten people dead and over 5,000 injury claims, Scott announced his first headlining concert return to the stage. His first solo show is taking place on August 6th at London’s O2 Arena, which has a capacity of 20,000 people. This performance comes before his already announced November headlining set at Primavera Sound in São Paulo, Brazil and would have come before Scott’s Day N Vegas festival headlining performance had it not been recently cancelled.

Tickets for the London show sold out within two hours of going on sale, and Scott wasted no time in adding a second show. Scott posted on his Instagram feed this past weekend to announce the second show, which will be happening the next night on August 7th at 02 Arena. The image shows both dates, but with a “Sold Out” tag in front of the first concert and his comment reads, “Ahhhhhhhhh…quicker than a flash,” with British flag emojis interspersed between the text. “Extra date added due to demand,” reads the caption above the newly added concert.

As Complex reports, a spokesperson for Scott issued a statement referencing Scott’s performance at this past weekends Coney Art Walls, saying, “Travis’s packed weekend performances and [the] fact that his O2 show in London sold out within two hours are just the latest signs that fan demand is sky-high for the return of one of the world’s favorite artists.”

To Scott’s credit, he stopped the Coney Island show to ensure that fans that were climbing a lighting truss made their way down before the show continued. When he takes the stage for two nights in London this coming August, things will surely have a different tone than in the past.

Debra Messing reportedly went off on Joe Biden during a call between celebrity Democrats, activists, and the White House. The call was organized in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and apparently, Messing was one of the more outspoken critics who blamed the administration for allowing abortion rights to be stripped away. The Will & Grace star reportedly wondered why she even bothered voting at all.

Via CNN:

The mood was fatalistic, according to three people on the call, which was also co-organized by the advocacy group Build Back Better Together. Messing said she’d gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked to do anything at all, yelling that there didn’t even seem a point to voting. Others wondered why the call was happening. That afternoon, participants received a follow-up email with a list of basic talking points and suggestions of Biden speech clips to share on TikTok.

In Messing’s defense, her criticism echoed many on social media who have voiced displeasure with the administration after Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential thanks to a massive voter turnout. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Democrats, in general, have been raked over the coals for not “doing something” despite working with a Senate stymied by Republicans and a Supreme Court that’s now stacked with three Trump appointees, who have shown no signs of letting up on a laundry list of conservative agenda items.

(Via CNN)

By now, we’re all painfully aware of the process that plays out in the wake of a mass shooting like the one that occurred during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois yesterday: While the world mourns, lawmakers who have no intention of broaching the topic of gun control offer meaningless “thoughts and prayers” and claim that “now” is not the time to talk about how we can prevent further incidents of mass gun violence. But Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker is a different kind of lawmaker.

On Monday, as Mediaite reports, Pritzker took a hardline stance on the need for further gun control when he held a press conference and addressed the people of Highland Park, the state of Illinois, and America at large. Pritzker relayed that he had just spoken with Joe Biden, who “agrees with me: this madness must stop.” He went on to address the events of the morning directly, powerfully noting that “the families of six individuals woke up today to join a community celebration of our nation’s independence. They will go to bed tonight less than whole.”

Pritzker, noting how “furious” he was, let others know that they have every right to be angry, too:

“There are going to be people who say that today is not the day, that now is not the time to talk about guns. I’m telling you, there is no better day and no better time than right here and right now. It’s the Fourth of July, a day for reflection on our freedoms. Our founders carried muskets, not assault weapons. And I don’t think a single one of them would have said that you have a constitutional right to an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine.”

Highland Park police arrested a 22-year-old suspect on Monday; he has yet to be formally charged.

(Via Mediaite)

Ahead of their upcoming album, Maybe In Another Life…, Easy Life has dropped “OTT,” a new pop-rock collaboration with Benee.

Short for “over the top,” “OTT” is a conversational song telling the story of a friend who is on a self-destructive streak. The song was recorded by Easy Life and Benee remotely during quarantine.

“Like most things easy life,” said Murray Matravers of Easy Life in a statement, “there is still that element of optimism: that perhaps with enough care and attention, something can be done. Benee crushed it – her voice is like water and she’s a real queen of melody.”

In the song’s accompanying music video, the members of Easy Life are seen performing against a green screen, which then switches to a variety of quirky backgrounds — including a city skyline, an 80s-aesthetic sunset, and a blue sky with puffy clouds. Benee then shows up to deliver her verse in a colorful spotted shirt, as well as a lavender-colored coat with different-sized holes in it. After her verse, the men of Easy Life are seen laying down, as a kaleidoscopic spreads copies of them across the screen.

Check out “OTT” above.

Maybe In Another Life… is out 8/12 via Geffen. Pre-save it here.